‘Because we are all Europeans!’ When do EU Member States use normative arguments?

Abstract

Recent debate has highlighted the importance of communication and arguments to explanations of the progress and results of international negotiations. Various studies have indicated that member states taking part in EU negotiations do indeed use arguments, either owing to a normative conception of arguing as a ‘truth seeking discourse’ or a conception of strategic arguing. We also know that contextual conditions, such as the extent to which negotiations are publicized, or the characteristics of the issue being negotiated, affect the degree of arguing. This contribution takes a different view, focusing on actor-specific use of arguments. I find that some member states are more inclined to use arguments than others and try to find explanations that could account for this variation. I hypothesize that the availability of power resources derived from bargaining theory should affect the use of arguments. The subject under investigation here is the EU Intergovernmental Conference leading to the Treaty of Amsterdam (1997). By means of an automated content analysis of member states' position papers, I show that member states who have good alternatives to the agreement being negotiated are less likely to use arguments.

Keywords:

• Arguing-bargaining-debate
• EU intergovernmental negotiations
• negotiation strategies
• quantitative text analysis
• rhetorical action

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Research Colloquium of the European Politics Research Group at ETH Zürich (2009), the ECPR General Conference in Potsdam (2009) and the Research Colloquium at the Chair of International Relations, Konstanz University (2010). I thank the participants of these sessions for their helpful feedback, especially Tina Freyburg, Will Lowe, Sebastian Haunss and Heike Klüver. Furthermore, I am grateful to the editor and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments. Special thanks are owed to Katharina Holzinger and Jan Biesenbender who constantly inspired and contributed to the work on this article during intensive collaboration in the research project ‘Constitutional Evolution in the European Union’ (principal investigator Katharina Holzinger), supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG), grant number: HO 1811/6-1. I also thank Annika Jochum and Florian Nieselberger for their assistance in coding the document data for the dictionary. All remaining errors are my own.

Notes

A list of the documents is provided in the web-annex. The documents can be found on the database on EU Treaty Negotiations: http://www.polver.uni-konstanz.de/holzinger/dokumentendatenbank/

The formula used is:

I thank Jan Biesenbender for allowing me to use the index, which he conceptualized and gathered the data for. The measurement of the mean parliamentary position is taken from the ParlGov database (Döring and Manow 2010).

Before the regression, I tested for correlations between the independent variables. The highest value for Pearson's r exists between the variables ‘GDP’ and ‘intra-EU trade share’ with r = - 0. 65. Additionally, I used VIF-test for every single regression.

In this model Luxembourg and Portugal are influential outliers. However, the results do not change considerably when they are left out of the analysis.

One might argue that the trade share with the EU is not only an indicator for the dependency on co-operation, but has confounding effects with other variables, such as the attitude towards European integration. The argument is that countries with a greater intra-EU trade share are, in general, quite integration-friendly, or that the high trade share results from a pro-integrationist attitude. However, the trade share does not correlate with an integration-friendly bargaining position (r: 0.15; information on integration-friendly positions is taken from Thurner et al. (2002: 166).